Famous People's Birthdays

Analysis of Famous People's Birth Dates

There exists a popular belief, that the date of a person's birth is correlated
to his (or her) personality, talents, preferences and, to some extent, the
chance of success in life. We were curious if this is true and decided to do
some simple calendar related calculations to verify it. Particularly, we
wondered in what days, months and seasons of the year most of the famous people
(of various occupations) were born.

For this purpose, we gathered the dates of births of over 46 000 famous
people from English wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org) listed for each day of
the year. Using this data we created calendar "heat maps" for each month
and day of the year, showing the number of the famous people that were born on
each specific date through thousands of years of human history. Results were divided into
"loose" categories based on the occupations (professions). The results are
listed below and on the pages related to specific categories.

How to read the results?

The more warmer the color, the more people were born
on that day or month. Below each table there are also bar charts showing the
number of births for each month and (astronomical) season of the year.

What do the results show?

Theoretically, the numbers of famous people born each day should be similar,
assuming that the same number of people (including non-famous) were born each
day of the year and there is no real correlation between the date of the year
you were born and a chance of becoming famous. But it is nearly impossible to
verify that because the statistics gathered relate to many centuries and regions
of the world. However, the size of the data gathered is large enough to wonder
if the differences shown are the sings of some hidden connection
between the person's birth date and his (or her) chance of becoming famous.

How reliable are the results?

We tried to create accurate statistics, but the results presented should be
regarded only as a curiosity for various reasons. Firstly, we had no control over the
selection of the people whose birth dates were taken into account, because
wikipedia is edited by thousands of volunteers all over the world. Secondly, we
had no guarantee that all the interesting people were listed on wikipedia (as
of May 2012). There could be also some minor counting errors due to
misspellings.